Barco Nv Unsp/Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this conference call on Barco's full year results for 2023. My name is Willem-Francois. I'm heading investor relations, and today with me in the room are Charlotte Boudoin and Anstegen, our co-CEOs, and Anders Senders, the CFO. We are publishing our annual results today under the headline, Solid Profitability Improvement with Stable Top Line. Anstegen and Anders Senders will take us through the presentation this morning. And this presentation is also available on the portal on our website. After the presentation, there will be room for Q&A. And I would now like to give the word to Anstine to kick it off with the presentation.

Thank you, Willem. Good morning, everybody. So I'll start with a summary of the group results for the full year 2023. So top line sales, we came in at 1 billion 50 million, which is in line with last year. We saw double-digit growth in entertainment, but our healthcare division was lagging, mainly because of the unusual high inventories at our customers. Book2Build remains positive, so we basically entered this year with a very solid order book of about 500 million, and 65% of our total revenue came from eco-label products, which is up from 50% last year. In EBDA margin, we landed at 13.6% of sales, which is 1.6 percentage points up compared to last year. And in the second half of 23, our EBDA margin was 14.6%. So we had a record high gross profit margin that mainly came from a very favorable product mix, but also, of course, an ease in our supply chain and focus actions when it came to the OPEX control. But of course, we continue to invest in our core initiatives throughout the year. Then our net income landed at 80 million, free cash flow at 38 million, and that is net after 11 million restructuring costs. And as I said before, we continue to invest in our core initiatives. So we stepped up in CAPEX executing on our strategy. We definitely work on inventory reduction and that these are efforts and work that is still going on in 24. Net cash we landed at 241 million. Now I hand it over to Anne for the financial details.

Thank you and good morning from my end. Starting with the comparison on the key figures compared to 2022. So in the comparison you see and I'm happy to see a lot of green in there overall. So orders and sales landing at the same level as the year before. Gross profit is the main up, 2.8 percentage points higher. EBITDA, 1.6 percentage points higher. Free cash flow higher. Net income, 5 million higher. And with that, earnings per share, 6% higher. And going in more detail in the following slides on the different figures. Starting to give a little bit of more insight on the different semesters, first, second, and then through here. And maybe zooming in on this second semester over here. So landed with about 10 billion more cells than the first half. Gross profit, and this is really where throughout the year you hear the saying on steady improvement across the year, throughout the year, and has been confirmed. So with a step up to 42.6% gross margin for the second half. And this is throughout the different business units, actually, but with the main uptake into entertainment. OPEX control being confirmed here with the second semester OPEX not higher or even lower than the first semester and with that then landing at an EBITDA margin of 14.6%.